Transport

Two young women in brightly coloured hijabs and tight jeans stand on the edge of a freeway as cars whiz by. They watch the traffic, heavy in Amman where car ownership is skyrocketing by 10-15 percent a year. When there’s a break in the steady flow of vehicles, the women hold hands and race across the road.

Maldivian women, long used to taking a backseat in the Muslim-dominated Indian Ocean country, say they are determined to ensure that they are not deprived of their rights under the new regime of President Mohammed Waheed Hassan.

China may be the country that emits the most carbon dioxide (CO2), but oil-rich Venezuela and some of its Caribbean neighbours produce more of this greenhouse gas responsible for global warming on a per capita basis.

What does riding a bike have to do with women’s rights? According to the Chilean feminist group Macleta, which promotes cycling and a gender perspective on public transport, a bicycle is a powerful tool for social change.

With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a ‘mobile hospital’ drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.

Though Vitoria-Gasteiz, capital of the Basque Country, was elected the European Green Capital of 2012 – an award presented by the European Union to promote and reward efforts to mitigate climate change – Spain still has a long way to go to earn the label of ‘sustainable’ for others cities around the country.

Increasingly frequent and tragic railway accidents in Argentina, like this week’s crash, show that the rail system, run by private companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from the state, constantly ignores warnings from inspectors and fines, observers say.

Latin America and the Caribbean celebrated their 45th anniversary as a nuclear-weapon-free zone amidst allegations of British deployment of nuclear weapons to the South Atlantic and with no specific regime for the transport of radioactive waste.

Last month the first cargo train crossed the ‘Friendship Bridge’ from Uzbekistan to the border town Hairatan in northern Afghanistan, and rolled along 75 kilometres of newly laid track to Mazar-e-Sharif.

The rough road is almost indistinguishable from the mud huts and dilapidated surroundings of this village - still pockmarked by the artillery duels of Sri Lanka’s fierce civil war that ended more than two years ago.

With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia's Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.

The Suape port complex may be eternally absolved of its environmental sins for ushering in unprecedented prosperity in the impoverished northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, and for having been built before stricter requirements were introduced.

Policies for higher fuel efficiency in vehicles could contribute to reducing the carbon footprint of transportation, which is responsible for 23 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, according to experts at a meeting in the Mexican capital.